Crispy Hasselback Potatoes with Garlic

While surfing for good recipes online, I came across this recipe for Hasselback Potatoes. They looked not only different and interesting, but crispy too. And when I read the recipe, it mentioned that sliced garlic was stuffed in each of the potato slits. This did it for me, and I had to try these. I’m glad I did, they turned out very good and were in fact crispy, but not as crispy as a potato chip.
I will definitely make these again, but I have some ideas for how I might change them a bit — stay tuned.

Ingredients:
4 or 5 large cloves of garlic (depends on how many potato slits you end up with)
2 large russet potatoes
olive oil
around 1/4 stick of butter
salt and pepper

Preparation:
Slice your potatoes crossways from one end to the other, but make sure you don’t cut all the way through, so the slices are held together at the bottom. Make your slices about ⅛ inch thick.
Slice the cloves of garlic as thin as you can, and put a slice between each of the potato slits.
Place potatoes into an oven baking dish.
Drizzle some olive oil over the potatoes, making sure oil works its way in between each of the potato slices.
Sprinkle some freshly ground black pepper and sea salt over the potatoes.
Cut eight ⅛-inch-thick slices of butter, and spread four on top of each potato.
Cover the baking dish with foil, and place in a 425 degree F oven.
Bake for about 30 minutes, covered. Remove the foil, and brush some of the oil and butter in the bottom of the dish back on the potatoes. Bake another 30 minutes. (If you don’t have much butter and oil dripping in the bottom of the baking dish, add 2 or 3 more butter slices on top of each potato.)

Prepared on 2011-05-15 (Tulsa, OK), Photograph by Michael Findley